Just as troubling as the number of cases of athletes perpetrating violence against women has been the refusal of colleges — and the NCAA as a whole — to acknowledge the problem or offer penalties against players for these offenses. Sometimes, schools go so far as to hinder the investigation into the allegations. Not only do many of these players often not face repercussions from their school, some even go on to successful NFL careers, like Jameis Winston, the former Florida State University quarterback who was accused of raping a female student. He’s trending on Facebook today for a play he made as the starting quarterback for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers — a good indication that the claim that rape allegations will destroy an athlete’s career are unfounded and largely untrue.

This past week, two more incidents of college football players allegedly harming women gained national attention. The first was out of the University of Minnesota, where 10 football players were suspended while the school was investigating an alleged incident of gang rape by those players. The second was the release of video footage of Oklahoma running back Joe Mixon punching a woman in the face, an incident which took place in 2014. And, while these assaults are evidence of a continuing trend in college football, the responses to the incidents may indicate a subtle cultural shift. In many ways, they’ve been discouraging, but there have also been reasons to be heartened.

University of Minnesota

At the University of Minnesota, the Office of Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action (EOAA) investigated allegations that at least a dozen players took turns assaulting a student in running back Carlton Djam’s room. “I was shoving people off of me... They kept ignoring my pleas for help. Anything I said they laughed. They tried to cheer people on,” the alleged victim testified. Luther’s book, Unsportsmanlike Conduct: College Football and the Politics of Rape, found that a disturbingly large number of rapes committed by college football players involved more than one assailant, and a recent study found that 40% of multiple perpetrator cases reported to schools involved student athletes.

Despite the fact that the police decided against filing any charges in the University of Minnesota case — due in part to video evidence that led investigators to conclude that “the sexual contact appear[ed] entirely consensual” — the school decided to move forward with the investigation and recommend expulsion for five of the players, a one-year suspension for four others, and probation for one.

Initially, members of the University of Minnesota football team stood together to boycott the suspensions, saying they refused to play in an upcoming bowl game until the players received “due process.” Their coach, Tracy Claeys, expressed support for his players on social media.

However, the players appear to have began their boycott before reading the details of the school’s investigation. Once the report was made public, the team announced that their strike was over. The fact that the players took such a hard, public stance against the university before acquiring all the facts was ill-considered (and that’s putting it mildly). However, the fact that the university is taking the allegations so seriously despite the police not filing any charges is encouraging. So is the players ultimately dropping their boycott, even though it shouldn’t have required a reading of the investigative report for them to do so. The idea that players were being denied “due process” and that perpetrators of rape are not guilty unless being convicted in a court of law is problematic, particularly because 97 out of every 100 rapists are never convicted and never spend a day in jail, according to RAINN.

Joe Mixon

In the case of Joe Mixon’s brutal physical assault of fellow OU student Amelia Molitor in 2014, a tape shows the two exchanging words. The woman appears to shove Joe, and then punches her in the face and walks out of the establishment. The punch broke four bones in the woman’s face and her jaw had to be wired shut during her recovery. At the time, Joe was immediately suspended for the entirety of the 2014 season, required to attend sensitivity trainings and counseling, and pled guilty to misdemeanor charges for which he received a suspended sentence and community service.

It is promising that the team took immediate action to suspend Joe, who has since apologized for his behavior that night (while maintaining that the woman's friend used racial slurs toward him before he hit her, which is still not a reason to assault anybody. Afterward, Joe's status as running back for the Oklahoma Sooners was reinstated and he will be eligible for the 2017 NFL draft. And there was very little outrage over the incident until the video surfaced, much like the University of Minnesota players requiring the investigative report to be released before believing the allegations. As ESPN's Andrea Adelson said:

“Mixon served a one-year suspension, which was basically just a redshirt season. Molitor went without eating solid food, or laughing, or smiling, as her face healed. He still got to be Joe Mixon, Sooners scholarship athlete. She became another version of herself entirely, temporarily disfigured, broken and, in some cases around campus, blamed.”

Male perpetrators still receive benefit of the doubt

Many victims don't report right after an assault, meaning that physical evidence isn't always available and even when it is, cases often come down to the stories of the parties involved. This creates a system in which disbelieving victims is the default. And on top of that, the proof has to withstand victim-blaming rhetoric and scrutiny of every word and action the victim took before and after the assault — What were they wearing? How much had they been drinking? Why would they have gone up to the alleged perpetrator's room if they didn’t want to have sex? This is especially true when the alleged perpetrators are high profile or beloved athletes, even though false rape allegations are statistically very rare.

As Luther told us in an interview earlier this year, universities are “interested in their public relations and their PR and their reputation.” Hitting schools where it hurts — their pocketbooks — may be the key to turning the culture around. It is potentially for this reason that we are beginning to see them take violence committed by their athletes seriously. As more and more people in sports media speak up about how unacceptable their actions have been, as more alumni send angry emails and withhold monetary donations until schools improve, as parents reconsider enrolling their students as a result of the the handling of sexual assault investigations, the people in charge are finally, it appears, beginning to listen.

We have a long way to go to get to a place where misogyny and rape culture are weeded out of college football locker rooms and campuses alike. And just as we recognize the problems, we must recognize the progress where it exists, even if it’s slow, even if it’s small. The hardest part of stopping rape culture is recognizing what it looks like. If we continue to call it out as it happens, then colleges can, and will, learn to do better.